GIMP 2.4 Released

Enselic writes "After almost three years since the release of GIMP 2.2, the GIMP developers have just announced the release of GIMP 2.4. The release notes speak of scalable bitmap brushes, redesigned rectangle/ellipse selection tools, redesigned crop tool, a new foreground selection tool, a new align tool, reorganized menu layouts, improved zoomed in/zoomed out image display quality, improved printing and color management support and a new perspective clone tool."

Comments

Re:GIMP 2.3?

[ScislaC]

2.3 was the devel branch leading up to 2.4

Re:Most important thing

[jklappenbach]

I don't know about Paintshop, but there's a Photoshop-esque makeover for GIMP called Gimpshop. It has a couple of rough edges, but it's a testament to the modularity of design that a self-declared novice developer could take the existing GIMP framework and remake it in PS's image.

The download link can be found here.

http://www.gimpshop.com/download.shtml

Re:GIMP 2.3?

[Raphael]

The stable GIMP releases have even numbers. The last stable release before 2.4.x was GIMP 2.2.x, starting with 2.2.0 released in December 2004. So that was almost three years ago. There were several bug-fix releases in the meantime, up to 2.2.17.

The unstable 2.3.x releases ended with the last versions becoming release candidates for 2.4.

Re:Most important thing

[Hennell]

If you have actual ideas for the GIMP UI go mention them at http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/ rather then just complaining here. They are aware the UI is generally disliked, they just need the best ideas of how to change it.
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Did the Ancient Egyptians play stone, papyrus, scimitar?
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Re:Most important thing

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"For instance, I can keep the image full-screen on one monitor while using the editing tools on a second monitor. I'd like to see a single-window app like Photoshop do that!"

Despite popular belief, Photoshop's panels aren't stuck inside of the parent window. You can do exactly as you described in Photoshop, and it's been that way for at least two years.

Re:patents

[drgonzo59]

It's not just converting from one coordinate system to another that is tricky, it's what do you do with the mismatched and non-existing colors in the other color space.

Re:What about...

[wishmechaos]

LCDs do not 'add colour': it's a substractive process. You start with white light, which contains every colour possible, and you filter it to only let through the colours you want to display (IE, if you put a red filter in front of a while light, you only let red pass, while blocking green and blue)

Re:patents

[NMerriam]

A lot of the key algorithms, particularly for color space conversion, are patented. Guess who holds a bunch of those patents?

Oh please. That is not and never has been the problem. The problem is that the program was initially created with the assumption that all images would be 8-bit RGB, and then a huge amount of code was built on top of that silly assumption.

Yes, you can run into IP issues with things like Pantone, DIC, Toyo, or a particular set of CMYK transforms, etc, but that has nothing to do with the limitations of the GIMP. There are plenty of other image editors that have no problem doing color space conversions or dealing with >8-bit images because they were written by programmers who actually listen to graphics professionals.

Re:What about...

[fbjon]

That's the precision of you're talking about, not range. The range in a colour space comes from which specific colours you are mixing. Losing colour when converting from one space to another is a consequence of the spaces not overlapping perfectly, i.e. some colours exist in one space but are completely outside another space (as in: no amount of mixing, bit depth and trickery will ever display that color).

Since printing presses print with CMYK and not RGB, and CMYK is not equivalent to RGB, it makes perfect sense to use the same colour space, and hence it doesn't make sense to adopt a tool that can't do that.

Re:patents

[ozmanjusri]

What part of "patent" do you not understand?

No, that's not the problem.

CMYK and spot colors by themselves are not patent encumberd. They are actually part of the open published standards for Postscript and PDF. Anyone saying anything different is clueless or spreading FUD and/or openly demonstrating their ignorance of the fact. http://rants.scribus.net/2006/06/03/why-no-cmyk-in-gimp-is-a-good-thing-now/

The Gimp developers do intend to bring CMYK to the app, but the underlying graphics engine is based around 8bpp RGB. Rather than hack the old engine to work with CMYK and higher bit depths, they decided to build the future Gimp on a generic graphical library called GEGL. That meant waiting until GEGL had a stable API and worked well enough to be better than the existing 8bpp engine in production use.

GEGL will most likely be in 2.6, along with the new MMIWorks-designed UI UI

Re:Most important thing

[LunarCrisis]

Oh, you mean like this?

Re:You have no idea what you are talking about

[hankwang]

The reason for more than 8 bits is for processing in the digital realm. For instance if your picture is 1/4 as bright as you want it, and you multiply by 4, then you lose two bits of resolution (as the bottom 2 will be zero).

There are other advantages of 16+ bits. 8-bit RGB images are usually in sRGB space, which means that the luminance of a pixel is not proportional to the pixel value, but rather something like the 2.2'th power except for a small range near zero. That is convenient for encoding a large contrast range in just 256 values, but sucks for operations that are inherently linear operators on the luminance, such as background substraction and blurring. With 16+ bits, all operations can be done in linear space without loss of resolution at the darker colors.